![[University of Waterloo]](/images/logobars/greenbar.gif)
| Yesterday |
Thursday, March 17, 2005
|
Editor: Chris Redmond credmond@uwaterloo.ca |
Fourth-year Warrior guard Graham Jarman in action. Photo courtesy of Glenn Bartley of Big Game Photography. |
Waterloo is seeded seventh of the ten teams in the national tournament, which is being played at the 10,000-seat Metro Centre. They'll begin tournament action facing the tenth-ranked team (and home-town favourite) St. Mary's Huskies tonight. Action starts at 5 p.m., Waterloo time. If the Warriors win tonight, they'll face Concordia at 3:00 Waterloo time tomorrow. If -- perish the thought -- they lose tonight, they'll play Brandon or Ottawa at 11:00 tomorrow morning.
Top-ranked team in the tournament is the Carleton Ravens, who haven't lost a league or post-season game since November 2002, and who are aiming to become three-in-a-row national champions. They'll play for the first time on Friday night.
"Seventh-ranked Waterloo went neck-and-neck all season with No. 3 Brock in the OUA West division," says a summary from Canadian Interuniversity Sport. "Finishing the regular season with identical 19-3 marks, the Warriors claimed first place with a 2-0 head-to-head record but saw the Badgers take the OUA West final 71-65." The Warriors are led by such players as guard Graham Jarman, who has scored 498 points in 33 games, and forward Dave Munkley, close behind him with 449 points including 26 three-pointers.
No doubt there will be a few diehard Warrior fans in Halifax tonight and tomorrow, but for those who can't make the trip, the athletics department says arrangements have been made to provide audio play-by-play of Waterloo's games over the Internet. "Go to www.news-cast.com just before game time and follow the links," fans are told. "Listeners must have Windows Media Player and a sound card and speakers." (Yeah, I guess speakers would help.)
Live statistics for the tournament are also available online, and the television network TSN will broadcast two semifinal games on Saturday night and the championship game at 3:30 Waterloo time on Sunday.
![[Wedge with the broad end at Columbia Street]](/images/2005/0309reserve.gif)
A map
published by the City of Waterloo indicates the area covered by the
north campus "environmental reserve", where work is now under way for
"the dredging and grading of Columbia Lake, creation of new shorelines,
the excavation of a by-pass channel valley, and maintenance of the
Columbia Street dam. Future phases of the rehabilitation plan will
include creating a new Laurel Creek channel around Columbia Lake to take
Columbia Lake offline from Laurel Creek."
|
Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada has donated $25,000 in support of the event, says a release from UW's media relations office.
The international robotics competition is open to the public and all are welcome to attend. The FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) competition has grown to more than 900 teams competing in 30 regional events and culminates in the championship event to be held April 21-23 at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta with more than 7,000 student participants.
"At TMMC, we believe strongly in teamwork and innovation. This type of competition helps students understand the power of teamwork, as well as sharpen their competitive skills," said Ray Tanguay, Toyota's president.
The competition challenges teams of students and their mentors to solve a common problem in a six-week timeframe using a standard "kit of parts" and a common set of rules. Teams build robots from the parts and enter them in a series of competitions designed by FIRST founders Dean Kamen and Woodie Flowers.
"FIRST redefines winning as scoring the most points is a secondary goal," says electrical and computer engineering professor Rob Gorbet, who chairs the FIRST Waterloo Regional planning committee. "Winning means building partnerships that last." Gorbet said teams are rewarded for excellence in design, demonstrated team spirit, gracious professionalism and maturity, along with the ability to overcome obstacles.
"TMMC has always been a strong community supporter," said Gorbet. "Their contribution to growing FIRST Robotics locally shows they feel this kind of program is strategic in building the capabilities of the workforce of the future. We have seen the positive impact of FIRST in other jurisdictions on high-school completion rates and university enrolment and success."
The sponsorship will help UW provide the second Canadian venue for the international FIRST Robotics competition for high school students. Earlier, ATS Automation Tooling Systems and Research In Motion were also announced as major sponsors of the event.
| WHEN AND WHERE |
|
Debating Society public debate: Should the Federation of Students
support religious and ethnic clubs? All welcome. 1 p.m.,
Doug Wright Engineering room 2527.
'Pre-Slavic Odessa: Legacy of the Graeco-Roman Empire.' Anna Makolkin, University of Toronto, sponsored by classical studies, Germanic and Slavic studies, and Italian studies. 1:30, Doug Wright Engineering room 1502. Chemical engineering lecture: Park M. Reilly Lecture by John MacGregor, McMaster University, "Data-based Latent Variable Methods for Process Analysis, Monitoring and Control", 3:30, Coutts Hall room 110. Career workshop: "Business Etiquette" 3:30, Tatham Centre room 1208. Anthropology career night 5 p.m., Tatham Centre room 2218. Bechtel Lecture at Conrad Grebel University College: Fernando Enns, University of Heidelberg, second of two lectures on "Mennonites, a Peace Church in Conversation", 7:30 p.m. 'Marat/Sade', drama department major production, 8 p.m., Theatre of the Arts (continues through Saturday), tickets 888-4908. 'You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown', play produced by Conrad Grebel University College students, tonight through Saturday 8:00, Registry Theatre, 122 Frederick Street, Kitchener. Graduate House St. Patrick's Day party with Celtic music by Calres Lemon, cover $5 for non-members. Irish stew on the menu. Pension and benefits committee Friday 8:30, Needles Hall room 3004. Centre for International Governance Innovation presents Jack Mintz, C. D. Howe Institute, "Tax Policy in the 21st Century for Mid-size Economies", Friday 12 noon, 57 Erb Street West. Engineering play: Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman's "You Can't Take It with You", performed by engineering students, Friday 8 p.m., Saturday 2 and 8 p.m., Arts Lecture Hall room 113, tickets $6, on sale noon hours in the Student Life Centre and Carl Pollock Hall foyer. Rainbow Reels Queer Film Festival Friday night through Sunday, Davis Centre room 1302, details online. 13th Annual Juggling Festival Saturday and Sunday, Student Life Centre, free public show 7:00 Saturday night, details online. |
Mary Flatt of the Centre for Advanced Studies in Finance writes that that organization and the Institute for Quantitative Finance and Insurance -- both based in UW's accountancy school -- are holding a one-day conference tomorrow. It's the Seventh Annual Financial Econometrics Conference. "The topic is Asset Allocation," she writes, "and speakers come from UCLA, Texas (Austin), New York, Princeton, and Toronto. The day-long conference will be held in DDavis Centre 1302. The program begins at 9:00 a.m. with a welcome from Phelim Boyle, the scientific director of IQFI."
Workshops and training sessions continue as UW moves toward a new design for its thousands of web pages (the last plausible estimate I heard was around 400,000 pages spread over some 300 servers across this campus). A new workshop tackles the subject from a new angle, says my colleague Jesse Rodgers here in communications and public affairs: "Although some people will use the Dreamweaver template (or some variation of it) in preparing their Common Look and Feel web site, other groups may prefer to wrap all pages on their site inside a server side include (SSI). By using an SSI, perhaps in combination with a simple Dreamweaver template, page components such as the left navigation can be stored in a single location, making modification to the navigation very simple. Several groups on campus are already examining how to do this, and some of these people have agreed to come and share their experiences." The SSI session is scheduled for Thursday afternoon, March 31, and registration is, as usual, online.
Space is still available in several of UW's distance education courses for the next few weeks, and university staff are among those who might benefit, says Dean Perkins, program coordinator in the continuing education office. He lists four of them: "Project Management Applied Tools and Techniques", all day April 4, 5 and 6; "Mediation I", all day April 7, 14, 21 and 28; "The Art of Influencing Difficult People", April 22; and "Writing for Public Relations and Marketing", mornings May 9, 11, 16 and 18. "Full-time UW staff receive a 50 per cent discount," Perkins notes, adding that course information is available on the continuing ed web site. The courses are all held at what he likes to call "the central UW campus" -- the CE outpost on Gage Avenue in Kitchener, partway between the main Waterloo campus to the north and the Cambridge architecture campus to the south.
Accounting students will hold their free income tax clinic today and tomorrow from 9 to 4 in the Student Life Centre. . . . Wilfrid Laurier University is holding its annual open house for prospective students and their parents tomorrow. . . . Since it's the day to affect an Irish heritage, there's lamb stew for dinner at REVelation cafeteria in Ron Eydt Village (or cheese quiche, if you're more the French kind of Irish). . . .
CAR